Welcoming Corel Painter 11!

The wait is over – Corel® Painter™ 11 is here – that’s right 11, not X1! Packed with new features and increased functionality, this is going to be the best version of Painter yet. The new features look great – and it looks like a lot of user-submitted feature requests from over at the Painter Factory community site were included. See – our feedback is important. Congratulations to the Painter Team on the release!

Now onto the stuff everybody wants to hear about:

What’s New?

• Brushes – Adding to the already rich set of brushes available to digital painters, Painter 11 introduces RealBristle™ Dry Media, which includes Rendering Markers, new dynamic Pens and Pencils and Chalk that respond to the tilt of your Wacom stylus!
• Selection Tools – The selection tools of Painter have been improved with a new Polygonal mode for the Lasso tool and improvements to the Magic Wand and other selection methods.
• Color Management – Color management in Painter just got easier. Manage your colors in a familiar dialog window with clearly labeled dropdowns. Get color management right the first time, every time! There is also improved color management support between Painter and Photoshop.
• Colors Wheel & The Mixer – Both the color wheel and the mixer palettes are completely resizable. If the color wheel is too small for your tastes, just make it bigger – same goes for the Mixer – mix more colors at once.
• Transformation Controls – Resize, rotate, move and skew layers quickly with the new Layer Transform tools. No more jumping to Photoshop to resize or adjust a layer only to hop back into Painter to continue painting.
• PNG Image Support – Save your Painter creations as lossless PNG files to share. Also allows opening PNG images to composite into your paintings.
• Performance – Painter 11 is the fastest version of Painter yet with an up to 30% gain in performance for brushes from Painter X.1.
• Of course, I haven’t gone over everything. There is more sprinkled throughout the whole program, but I’ll leave it up you all of you to find the goodies. Go check the Painter 11 page at Corel for more information.

Where to get it?

• ESD (Electronic Software Download) versions and trial versions will be available directly from Corel on February 25, 2009.
• Preorders for the boxed version are also being accepted and are set to begin shipping on March 18, 2009.

Your Thoughts

What feature (or features) are you most excited about in Painter 11 – what do you look forward to using the most? Leave a comment – Corel pops in for a visit every once in a while.